Does anyone know if Spotify has any sort of selection of (preferably cheap/free) Japanese audiobooks?
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I haven’t tried them myself but one of my friends mentioned using Smart Books on spotify. I think it’s geared more towards children though. There are some of those in Japanese, not sure if that’s what you’re looking for though.
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Someone at work mentioned camping in Japan, which led me down a deep YouTube rabbit hole… 
It started with this:
Then I got into Honda N-Vans which led onto reviews of N-One RS cars:
Which then led onto the Move Canbus minivan videos:
Also several Comprehensible Japanese, The Bite size Japanese Podcast and more of Kiki’s Delivery Service.
+4 hours
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Arguably, more travel than camping, but they do drive around in the cutest camper:
I absolutely love both of them and should watch more of their videos.
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August 6 
Various podcasts - 2 hrs 20 minutes
聴く日経 - 20 mins
トカトントン from ヴィヨンの妻 | L30?? - 30 mins
Total: 3 hours 10 mins
I was pretty tired when listening to トカトントン and kept zoning out, so I honestly didn’t get much of the story. I’m going to try it again tomorrow. 
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I was so busy yesterday that I barely got any listening done 
Around half an hour total. Most of it youtube.
This video was fun, and I recommend it for relaxed listening practice of casual conversation:
Three guys try to guess which absurd name an eyeshadow has been given by the manufacturer (I guessed 1/3 )
I also started this one, but haven’t finished it yet: 映画と小説、どっちが先？朝井リョウ『正欲』を絶対読みたくなる徹底ネタバレなしプレゼン・書評 which is two guys discussing the book 正欲 and the movie version which came out recently, no spoilers. I found one guy’s way of speaking kind of amusing, but generally they weren’t too hard to follow and I usually struggle keeping focus with podcast type stuff. The ‘video’ is actually just a podcast.
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I wish we had little kei-cars and the little kei camper vans here. 
instead cars here have been getting larger and larger. 
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tl;dr as of 8/6 I’m at 6.5/10 hours and probably going to need to increase that goal soon. 
Tracking my progress got unwieldy so I made a spreadsheet. Updates for the past few days:
Watched more Cardcaptor Sakura and Tokyo Mew Mew. We haven’t even gathered all of the allies in Mew Mew yet and I’m already considering dropping it, so I don’t think it’s for me… although it’s probably not fair to it to watch it along with CCS.
I also started listening to 放課後ミステリクラブ 1金魚の泳ぐプール事件 | L22 and got 45 mins in. It’s really easy to follow, despite having quite a few main characters. They’re all architypes so it’s easy to remember who’s who. Funnily enough, I feel like I know the least about the narrator, but it’s pretty easy to keep track of a narrator character.
btw, how do people track their audiobook progress? This hasn’t come up with me before since I usually read along to audiobooks (honestly, I hadn’t been brave enough to try it without text before). I saw a similar topic here: Audiobook read-along - do you log it?, but it doesn’t quite get to my issue. I don’t have a page number OR a percentage since audible only gives me the time read and remaining. I suppose I could do my own math, but lazy. I’m planning on keeping it at 0% and then marking as finished when I’m done, but that seems not entirely ideal.
(I’m also going to set the pages to 0 because I don’t want an audiobook read mucking up my page count, but maybe I’m also overthinking that…)
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Audible gives me “time listened” so I use that against the total, audiobook.jp only gives me “time left to listen” so I use that for theirs and thus different formats.
I already track all my books in a spreadsheet and did before Natively so this is just an extension of my normal processes.
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*sigh* I suppose this is probably just my answer.
I have a few places where I’m tracking things Natively can’t or doesn’t in a way I want, but I should probably go make that my source of truth…
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Okay! Here’s my vaguely weekly update lol. I did have to make a spreadsheet to keep track in the end
I told myself NO YOUTUBE for Korean as I want to focus on listening without visuals (and I already do a bunch of YT lmao so it’s not really a challenge) but…alas…I lost internet for 2 days without any audio downloaded/saved and fell super behind. So…
August 1st-7th
Audiobook 어서오세요, 고양이식당입니다 1: 20 min
A short story about a cat restaurant that appears only on moonlit nights. Different animals visit the restaurant and eat food while telling their story-- the chef cat takes their stories as payment. This is a series of 5 or 6 books I think.
Podcast 여둘톡 101: 1 hr 40 min
The girls talk about the cool women in the world that they look up to. A lot of volleyball stuff and players that I don’t know (but Korea LOVES) came up. Also they introduced a Youtuber lady who apparently used to be a radio host. She also got hate for quitting her longtime radio show and doing YT lol because well…she’s an unmarried older woman who is happy lmao.
Podcast 여둘톡 107: 1 hr 18 min
The girls were interviewed by NYT and talk about that experience in this episode. They talk about the focus of that article being ‘new family’ units and their own ideas about changing family structures. Interesting to hear as a 30-year-old unmarried woman with no children-- and no plans for it. Hearing how much hate people (women) get for just choosing to live their lives how they want to is always crazy.
YT 노잼같아 보였는데 1시간반 순삭 비밀일기 훔쳐보는 공포게임: 1 hr 30 min
Pretty fun horror game. Mostly counted it because there is A LOT of text so a lot of content. I didn’t bother to read the diaries/letters that make up most of the game though because the guy speaks a lot faster than I could ever read it so lolol much easier to just focus and listen. Sometimes I had to go back and listen twice to certain parts because…he really talks fast lmao.
YT 리뷰 8000개가 극찬인 “그냥 정리하는 게임” 또 나왔습니닼ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ: 57 min
I have no excuse for counting this in the challenge as it’s mostly him naming items and being like ‘okay nice’ or ‘wtf’. But I’m counting it hehe.
Audiobook 그곳에 네가 있어준다면: 4 hr 24 min
I’ll write a review eventually but this was a nice sequel. I did listen to it on 90% because idk it felt harder than the 1st one for some reason. Some sentences I had to go back and listen to at 80% lololol.
Total Korean: 10 hr 9 min / 25 hr
Total Spanish: 1 hr 27 min / 25 hr
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There’s no tax breaks in the UK - they actually cost more to insure and tax than larger domestic cars. So the value side is pretty poor.
I still want one. Or even a small collection.
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The horror
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Argh, a bit short today.
I listened to とったび - great fun, thanks for the recommendation @shitsurei , The Bite Size Japanese Podcast and Japanese with Shun.
+70 minutes
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I didn’t before this.
I just listen to them using Audible or audiobook.jp or the files I’ve downloaded of audiobooks I have only recently started tracking times for this challenge and I keep them handwritten in a mini Hobonichi Techo. I started last month keeping track of what episodes or books/ short stories I’ve read/ listened to so that I can see when I’m doing Japanese as my process had kind of gone astray but other than for this challenge, I don’t usually track actual times.
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Day 7:
I had started to feel a bit burnt out with all the focused listening so today I switched it up a bit and did 4 episodes of Japanese with Shun as well as a lesson of Erin’s challenge (a new set of videos/ lessons in Japanese for beginners aimed at students going to or living in Japan) between this morning and early afternoon. After that I started listening to Bite Sized Japanese (Thank you to @Mikemike88 for listing it above, I didn’t know about it til I followed the link - great resource 
).
Japanese with Shun and the Erin’s Challenge lesson came to around to just over an hour total, the Bite Size Japanese was more passive listening so I haven’t counted that time.
Erin’s challenge lessons are in full Japanese with very few subtitles and none in English so far but it is quite basic. E.g the first lesson deals mostly with basic introduction but since it’s full Japanese, I felt it was good shadowing practice for me as well as good listening practice too.
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Not really a proper update as I am having a really demanding week at work, so I didn’t have a lot of energy for listening today. I still managed 2 hours and 40 minutes of listening of various things, though. 
Hopefully the rest of the week is more relaxed.
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I’ve been thinking about how badly I want to read this all day. 
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